Anway, I'd like to keep gathering data on the meme that media proliferation has only led to narrowcasting, with different ideologies and demographics becoming more isolated from each other and more of a closed-circuit with their sources. (It's important to remember the media is, um, a media, and not a true source, so if you're diagramming this, emphasize the moderate increase in newsmakers, actors, authors, etc but the dramatic increase in channels, magazines, internet and the straight, nonoverlapping circuits between demographics and their media.
Of course, I can't do graphics on this blog, but there is
an image that's a pretty dramatic illustration of the same idea. I'm curious about the methodology, and I would be reluctant to generalize or even say it's a new phenomenon. But pretty dramatic. And who knew there were so many far-right or far-left books?
Or, take the Dean campaign. Please. This article by Ryan Lizza (if it was Rynn Liza I'd chuckle) describes the closed-circuit phenomenon, in this case with the "media" being replaced with "other Deaniacs" :
For the most part, though, the atmosphere on election night is oddly detached, as if everyone were watching a race in which they weren't actually participating. ...
We walk out of his office and hover over the clot of desks where the Internet team is busy posting to the blog and checking the temperature of the Deaniacs who are commenting online about the night's bloodbath. Nobody seems dispirited. Neel talks to Teachout about his appearance on her radio show that night and jokes about how his posts are being received by the Deaniacs. He raises his hands in the air and yells, "I want to blog!"
Yay, we finally have a candidate who interacts directly with his supporters, raising money from the little guys (still) and bypassing the fat cats and the biased media. But they alienate the unplugged masses everywhere they go. They haven't won any elections. And they persist, preseved in a vacuum, as the real world campaigns move forward.